Good Monday morning!

Between Train Town, tennis lessons, and the finale of “Downton Abbey” (is it wrong to hope Rose is shipped to America next season?), StrictlyVC ran out of time yesterday to write today’s column. But enjoy the intel below and stay tuned for some good stuff coming this week!

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Top News in the A.M.

Messaging giant WhatsApp, which already has 465 million users, will add voice services in the second half of this year, says TechCrunch.

Comcast and Netflix announced an agreement Sunday in which Netflix will pay Comcast for faster and more reliable access to Comcast’s subscribers. The deal, notes the New York Times, is a “milestone in the history of the Internet, where content providers like Netflix generally have not had to pay for access to the customers of a broadband provider.”

New Fundings

Beauty Noted, an 18-month-old, Sausalito, Ca.-based company that hasn’t yet launched but superficially looks like a Pinterest for beauty products, has raised $1.7 million of a $2.2 million round, shows an SEC filing. Kate Thorp, former CEO of Real Girls Media and Lot21, is chief executive.

Bigtincan, a three-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based maker of mobile content software, has raised $5 million in its first round of venture capital led bySouthern Cross Venture Partners.

Carwow, a 3.5-year-old, U.K.-based, new car buying platform, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding led by Balderton Capital, which was joined byEpisode 1 Ventures, Samos Investments, and numerous individual investors.

Changers, a four-year-old, Berlin-based startup that turns eco-friendly behavior into a game, has closed $1.5 million in Series A financing. The German government-backed fund BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburgled the round, says TechCrunch, with participation from clean energy specialist Heliocentris and other, unnamed private investors.

ClubLocal, a 3.5-year-old, Encino, Ca.-backed platform to book and buy household services like plumbing, has closed $10.7 million in funding. Investors include Groupon and numerous individual investors.

CourseHorse, a three-year-old, New York-based startup that helps people locate and enroll in local classes (beginning in New York City) has raised $3 million in new funding, shows an SEC filing. The company has raised $3.5 million to date, including from New York Angels and Golden Seeds.

eCommera, a 6.5-year-old, London-based company that offers advisory, support and software services to retailers that are developing and operating e-commerce businesses, has raised $41 million in Series C funding led by Dawn Capital. Other participants in the round includedWest Coast Capital, Frog Capital, ePlanet Capital, WPP and new partner Wti. The company has raised at least $51.4 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

GC Aesthetics, a 6.5-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based maker of breast implants, has raised $60 million led by OrbiMed Advisors, which contributed $40 million. Another $20 million came from Montreux Equity Partners and Oyster Capital. The company has raised $90 million to date.

Granular, a 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of cloud software and analytics for farmers (that was formerly called Solum), has raised $4.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures. No financial terms were disclosed, but the company disclosed at the same time that Monsanto Company has bought its soil science business. Granular has raised roughly $28 million so far, according to Crunchbase.

Hubub, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based online community platform whose visitors gather around user-generated topics, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The investors included Edgar Bronfman, Jr.; Todd Ruppert, the former CEO of T. Rowe Price Global Investment Services; and Tom Kalaris, former CEO of Barclays Wealth & Investment Management.

Kerecis Limited, a 6.5-year-old, Isafjordur, Iceland-based emerging tissue-regeneration company, has raised $2 million in the A3 series funding fromNSA Ventures, Iceland government’s venture capital fund; Omega3 ehf, an investment fund affiliated with London-based Novator; Capital ehf; 1924 ehf; Skógur ehf; Klofningur ehf; and Hradfrystihusid-Gunnvor hf. The company’s technology takes decellularized fish skin that has had all its cells and antigenic materials removed and applies it to areas of tissue damage where it recruits the body’s own cells and (so goes the ultimate goal) converts it into functional, living tissue.

Magisto, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based service for creating and editing personal movies on mobile devices, has raised $2 million from Mail Ru Group. Magisto is also backed by Horizons Ventures, Magma Venture Partner, Qualcomm Ventures and SanDisk Ventures. The company has raised $20.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

mCASH, a 7.5-year-old, Oslo, Norway mobile payment startup, has raised $7 million in funding from Northzone and Entrée Capital. Arctic Startup has more here.

Newlans, an 11-year-old, Acton, Ma.-based company that makes an analog wideband signal processing architecture for RF semiconductor applications, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital. Earlier investors Paladin Capital and Lockheed Martin Corporation also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $22 million.

Saisei, a three-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that makes virtual network appliances, has raised $5.6 million Series A funding round led byOxygen Ventures, which was joined by earlier, individual investors.

Seno Medical Instruments, a 8.5-year-old, San Antonio, Tx.-based medical device company that uses lasers and ultrasound to diagnose breast cancer, has raised $39 million in Series C funding led by MedCare Investment Funds, which was joined by unnamed individual investors. The company has raised at least $51 million to date.

SoundFocus, an 18-month-old, San Francisco-based company whose iOS app adjusts music based on a person’s unique abilities to hear different frequencies (and which is reportedly building a hardware equivalent of the app), has raised $1.7 million from Kapor Capital, Y-Combinator, Greg Badros, Ovo Fund, RTA Capital, Vegas Tech Fund, and individual investors.

VivaReal, a 4.5-year-old, Sao Paulo, Brazil-based real estate marketplace in Latin America that connects, buyers, sellers, and renters with properties, has raised $12.7 million in new funding, shows an SEC filing. The company has raised roughly $32 million since 2011, show filings, including from investors Valiant Capital Partners, Kaszek Ventures, Monashees Capital, and a long list of individual backers, like former eHarmony CEOGreg Waldorf.

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New Funds

Deep Fork Capital, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based venture firm, is targeting $50 million for its raising a second fund, shows an SEC filing. Deep Fork was founded by Aubrey McClendon, Andre de Baubigny andTimothy Komada, who provided all the money for Deep Fork’s first fund — reportedly a $500 million pool. (McClendon, it’s worth noting, cofounded and long served as CEO of the oil and natural gas company Cheapeake Energy Corporation, whose public market cap is currently $17.7 billion.) The three came together in 2002 when Komada and de Baubigny, a former investment banker, founded a wine storage business called Vintrust that raised money from investors, including McClendon. (Vintrust reportedly ran aground in 2009.) One of Deep Fork’s newest investments is in Amplify L.A., a startup accelerator that raised $8 million in Series B funding last month.

Maven Ventures, a five-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based seed-stage fund focused on mobile and consumer Web startups, has raised $4.2 million, shows an SEC filing. Maven Ventures was founded by Jim Scheinman, an early employee at the social network Friendster who went on to work for two startups founded by Michael and Xochi Birch. Scheinman was first the head of biz dev at their birthday alert company BirthdayAlarm; according to his LinkedIn bio, he later became the first employee of their social network Bebo, acquired by AOL in 2008 for $850 million in cash.

Morningside Group, a 28-year-old investment group with offices in Boston, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, has raised more than $400 million in capital for three new funds, according to filings with SEC first flagged by peHUB. The documents, filed Thursday, show that the firm has raised $279 million for Morningside China TMT Fund III, $40 million for Morningside China TMT Fund III Co-Investment, and $93 million for Morningside China TMT Special Opportunities Fund. Morningside was founded by billionaire brothers Ronnie and Gerald Chan, whose Hang Lung Group is among Hong Kong’s biggest real estate companies. (Gerald Chan has reportedly acquired gobbled up more than $100 million in real estate around Harvard Square in recent years, too.) Morningside invests in both private equity and venture capital deals in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific; one of its newest portfolio companies is Cheyipai, a used car trading platform in China.

PTV Sciences (for Pinto Technology Ventures), an 11-year-old, Austin Tx.-based venture firm that seeks out growth opportunities in healthcare and life sciences, is looking to raise up to $200 million for its fourth fund, shows an SEC filing that says the first sale has yet to occur. The firm raised its last fund in 2010.

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IPOs

Chukong Technologies, a four-year-old, Beijing-based mobile-gaming company, hopes to raise around $150 million through a IPO in the U.S. in the second half of this year, reports Bloomberg. Chukong develops leisure games for smartphones and according to its site, “Fishing Joy,” one of its most popular games, has attracted more than 200 million users in China. The company has raised just north of $83 million, according to Crunchbase; its investors include Northern Light Venture Capital,Steamboat Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and GGV Capital.

Roku, the 13-year-old, Saratoga, Ca.-based maker of set-top boxes that connect TVs to the Internet, is weighing an IPO this year, according to Bloomberg sources, who say the company hasn’t yet selected a banker. Last May, Roku raised $60 million in new funding from Hearst and an unidentified institutional investor. They joined News Corp., British Sky Broadcasting Group, Menlo Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and others backers who’ve collectively invested roughly $130 million in the company to date.

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Exits

Appslingr, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup that was incubated by the Alchemist Accelerator and has been building a system that lets people access any of their files and use any application on any device, was just acquired for an undisclosed amount by Otoy. L.A.-based Otoy is a cloud graphics company that itself just closed an undisclosed amount of Series D funding led by Yuri Milner two weeks ago. (Milner is just one of many heavy hitters associated with the company, whose board includes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, former IBM president Sam Palmisano, and Ari Emanuel, the cofounder and co-CEO of William Morris Endeavor.) You can read more about the deal here.

Burstly, a four-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based company, has been acquired by Apple for an undisclosed amount. Burstly makes an in-app ad management platform called SkyRocket that helps developers monetize their applications, and it’s the parent company of a popular mobile app testing platform called TestFlight. TechCrunch reported the news on Friday. Burstly had raised $7.3 million, according to Crunchbase, including from Upfront Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, and SoftBank Capital.

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People

Herbert Allen III, who took over his family-run firm, Allen & Co., in 2002, has turned the relatively small, 180-employee bank, into a serious Silicon Valley deal maker, all without establishing a California office. Powerful friends like investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel have helped.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban made a surprise appearance at the annual “SEC Speaks” conference in Washington on Friday. Wearing a gray hoodie, Cuban, who last fall beat the SEC in a years-long case against him, “sat in the back of the large auditorium, lighting up the Twitter-sphere with lively commentary about speeches from top SEC officials,” reports Reuters.

Drive Capital, the newly closed Midwest-focused venture firm of former Sequoia partners Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen, has named two partners to the firm: Robert Hatta and Ned Schwartz. Hatta joins as a talent partner; he was VP of talent for JumpStart Ventures, a Chicago-based seed-stage fund. Schwartz joins Drive after spending five years as an investor at Norwest Venture Partners and General Atlantic.

Todd Force, previously a CFO at the computer server company Rackable Systems, is joining the mobile software company MobileIron as CFO it prepares for an IPO, says the WSJ. MobileIron could be valued at more than $2 billion, according to the piece, which reports that MobileIron generated more than $100 million in revenue last year, according to a source.

Erin Gleason has just joined the venture firm Founders Fund as its first in-house communications person. Gleason came from the public relations firm the Hatch Agency and spent several years in public relations at Foursquare and Google before that.

On Friday, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham announced that he’s handing over leadership of the popular startup incubator to Sam Altman, a part-time YC partner since 2011 who also happens to have been part of the first YC startup class in 2005. (Altman’s startup, the location-based services startup Loopt, was acquired by Green Dot Corp in March 2012.) In a blog post, Graham said of the move that Altman is better equipped to continue scaling out Y Combinator. “I’m convinced there’s a fundamental change happening in the way work gets done. It’s becoming normal to start a startup.There will be a lot more startups in 10 years than there are now, and if YC is going to fund them, we’ll have to grow proportionally bigger. Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica [Livingston, Graham’s wife and cofounder] and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task.”

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is today Google‘s director of engineering, is profiled in his San Francisco home by The Guardian, and he tells the outlet that robots will be more intelligent than humans in 15 years. Says one critic of Kurzweil who is quoted in the piece, biologist PZ Myers: Kurzweil’s theories are a “very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”

Peter Thiel and MIT business professor Andrew McAfee squared off last Thursday night in a public debate about technological innovation and it’s relationship to widening income inequality. “I wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes if I felt the money was being spent as well as it was spent in the ‘30s or ‘50s,” Thiel told Forbes reporter Jeff Bercovici immediately after the discussion. “I live in the Marina area in San Francisco. They built the Golden Gate Bridge in three and a half years in the 1930s, ‘33 to ‘36. They’re now building an access road to the bridge that’s taken eight years and possibly will end up costing more in inflation adjusted dollars than the whole bridge cost in the ‘30s. So it’s one of the reasons I personally don’t want to pay more taxes, because I feel the government spends the money so extraordinarily badly. I’d be fine with paying more if I felt the government was run as well as it was run in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘30s.”

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Happenings

The three-day Launch Festival kicks off today in San Francisco. The agenda features a VC panel, a keynote by Paul Graham, and, of course, lots of startup demos.

The Samsung Unpacked 2014 event is happening today in Barcelona, Spain (where Samsung is expected to unveil the highly anticipated new Galaxy S5). The Korean electronics giant kicks off the event at 8 p.m. local time (11 a.m. PST); you can check it out live right here.

Samsung Unpacked is part of the broader, four-day-long trade show Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, featuring keynotes by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, along with lots of new product announcements. (You can see a live feed here.)

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Data

You might not guess it, but private equity and venture capital investments were up last year over 2012, says the Latin American Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. A total of $6.04 billion was committed to Brazil, compared with $5.7 billion in 2012. Investments in Latin America also increased, to $8.9 billion, up 13 percent from the $7.9 billion in 2012. The region had 233 deals last year, a slight drop from 237 in 2012. Dealbook has more here.

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Job Listings

Intuit is looking for a corporate development senior analyst to help identify, evaluate and help execute on M&A opportunities. The job is in Mountain View, Ca.

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Essential Reads

Apple is already building its next massive business and no one seems to have noticed.

The telecom industry has convened for its biggest get-together of the year at the Mobile World Congress event. Meanwhile, it’s never been less clear what it means to be a mobile-phone company.

WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for a stunning $19 billion last week, but when it went down on Saturday for a few hours, some of the tweets about the outage were priceless.

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Detours

“I had an epiphany the other day,” writes Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks. “I was in the middle of marking up a memo on U.S. drone policy while simultaneously ordering a custom-decorated cake for my daughter’s sixth grade musical cast party and planning my remarks for a roundtable on women in national security. Suddenly, it hit me: I hate Sheryl Sandberg.”

In his new GQ column, Momofuku founder David Chang sends a “sweet and salty valentine” to what he considers to be the most underrated meat in America: Yes, we’re talking bologna.

Tips for pulling an all-nighter.

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Retail Therapy

This new Garmin watch can track your progress in six different sports and deliver iPhone users notifications for calls, email and texts, among other things. Engadget says it “might be the only smart wristwear you need if your life revolves around fitness.” (To that, we say, we wish.)

Think you’ve seen everything down on Sand Hill Road? Just wait until someone pulls up in one of these jaw-droppers.

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Good morning, everyone, hope you have a super weekend. See you back here on Monday.

Also, quick (giant) thank you to those of you who reach out every week to let me know you’re enjoying StrictlyVC. As someone who is still trying to figure this out, it’s so very much appreciated!

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Top News in the A.M.

Microsoft head honcho Satya Nadella talks with the New York Times about his new role.

Amazon gets its TV box ready, again.

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Scribd CEO Trip Adler on Books, Froth, and the Company’s Next Round

Scribd has had a circuitous arc. Started in San Francisco in 2007, Scribd’s original concept was to allow anyone to take any kind of written content and slap it on the Web. (Fifty million documents have been uploaded since.) By 2009, it was also running an electronic book market, allowing authors and publishers to upload their works, then set their own price for them and keep most of the revenue. In 2011, Scribd also launching a news reading app called Float. (It later folded Float back into the company.)

But the company thinks it has struck on its most promising transformation yet, as a digital lending library that charges $8.99 per month for unlimited access to roughly 100,000 titles from publishing partners like HarperCollins that can be read on pretty much any kind device.

The company is about a year into the shift, though it only announced it in October of last year. Earlier this week, I talked with cofounder and CEO Trip Adler to see how it’s going – and whether Scribd might raise more funding to move past competitors (including, potentially, Amazon) that also want to become the Netflix of books.

What can you tell us about how your new business is going? Are you releasing subscriber numbers?

We aren’t, but they look good. Since launching a little over a year ago, the [number of subscribers has] been growing 50 to 100 percent each month. I haven’t seen anything grow quite this fast [at Scribd].

Your business is increasingly reliant on subscriptions, whereas your document sharing business is largely ad supported. How much of that $8.99 is going in your pockets versus publishers whose books you’re renting?

We pay publishers based on reading activity, so if a customer reads a book, we pay the publisher for the book.

That seems like an expensive proposition. How much do the books cost you?

Some of the romance books might cost a few dollars; some of the best-sellers can cost up to $15. We have some power readers who will read many books in one month, but the typical user reads a book a month, and we’re optimizing around the average user, who costs us less [than the $8.99 monthly subscription fee]. The model has been profitable since we launched it.

You’re gathering a lot of data about how people consume books, including what prompts them to skip ahead, and whether people aremore likely to finish biographies than business titles. Will you start charging publishers for these analytics?

Analytics isn’t part of our business model yet. So far, we’re just sharing it with publishers very openly, but it could be something down the road that we turn into a business model.

How are you marketing this new service?

Most of it has been organic; we have 80 million monthly active users, so we’re mostly marketing it to that audience, and growth hasn’t been a problem. We’re also starting to do more paid ads, and we’re talking to journalists like you.

How big is Scribd at this point, and is it profitable?

We have 55 employees, mostly in engineering and design. And we’ve been profitable for a while and growing revenue pretty steadily – 90 percent year over year since we started the company.

You’ve raised $26 million so far, with your most recent, $13 millionround closing in 2011. Are you back in the market or will you be soon?

We might fundraise if it feels like we have a use for the cash, but it hasn’t been a priority for us. Right now, we’re just focused on making the product the best that we can.

People are throwing a lot of money around right now.

Things do seem frothy to me. The valuations that companies are getting are just crazy. For that reason, it could be a good time to fundraise. If you can build a company and get it profitable, funding comes naturally, though. It’s harder to build a profitable business than to raise money.

New Fundings

Acompli, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s building a mobile email application to work as an all-in-one productivity app for the iPhone, has raised $7.3 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures. Other investors to join the round included Harrison Metal and Felicis Ventures.

Brand Embassy, a 2.5-year-old, Prague-based social customer care platform, has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors that include Rockaway Capital and Spread Capital. The company’s SaaS platform allows companies to answer customer questions through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter; it’s used by Vodafone and TMobile, among others, says FinSMEs.

Cylance, a two-year-old, Irvine, Ca.-based “math-based” threat detection and prevention company, today announced it has closed $20 million in Series B funding from Blackstone and earlier investors Khosla Venturesand Fairhaven Capital, among others. Cylance has raised $35 million altogether, according to Crunchbase.

e-Chromic Technologies, a three-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company that says its electrochromic thin film can turn standard windows into energy-efficient “smart” windows, has raised $600,000 in seed financing led by Amplifier Ventures, a seed-stage firm in McLean, Va.

Ezetap, a three-year-old, Bangalore-based mobile payment company focused on emerging markets, has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Helion Advisors, Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. The company has raised roughly $11.5 million to date.

GigaOm, the seven-year-old, San Francisco-based media company, has raised $8 million in new funding led by Shea Ventures. Earlier investors, including True Ventures, Alloy Ventures and Reed Elsevier Ventures, also participated in the funding. The company has raised roughly $22 million over the years, shows Crunchbase.

Inpria, a 6.5-year-old, Corvallis, Or.-based developer of high-resolution photoresists, has raised $4.7 million of a committed $7.3 million in financing led by Samsung Ventures, with participation from Intel Capital andApplied Ventures.

Meetup, a 12-year-old, New York-based online network of local groups, has closed a secondary round from three key investors — Twitter cofounderEv Williams, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, and Behance co-creator Scott Belsky — reports VentureBeat. The round was “kept small,” allowing 10 to 15 current and former employees to exercise their expiring stock options, Meetup’s CFO tells the outlet. Meetup itself “did not take in any money in this transaction.”

Mindbody, a 13-year-old, San Luis Obispo, Ca.-based maker of business management software for beauty, health and wellness industries, has raised $50 million from a syndicate of current and new investors, includingBessemer Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Catalyst Investors, W Capital Partners, and Montreux Equity Partners.

Modern Family Doctor, a 6.5-year-old, Bangalore-based chain of primary healthcare clinics and pharmacies, has raised a Series B round of undisclosed size from Bamboo Finance with participation of existing investor Saama Capital. In 2011, the company raised $2 million from Saama Capital.

Ornim Medical, a 10-year-old, Kfar-Saba, Israel-based biomedical technology company that’s developing non-invasive patient monitoring devices for cerebral and tissue blood flow, has raised $10 million in funding led by OrbiMed Israel, with participation from GE and Agate venture capital fund. The company has raised $20 million to date.

Smarter Remarketer, a 3.5-year-old, Indianapolis-based company tht makes customer intelligence software for retailers, has raised $7 million in financing led by Battery Ventures. The company has raised $10.3 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Crystal Tech Fund, a new Ashburn, Va.-based venture fund, is targeting a $50 million fundraise, shows an SEC filing. The firm’s founder is Paul Singh, a former partner at 500 Startups, who tells the outlet InTheCapital that he’s looking invest in “tech enabled” companies in the post-seed space. Says Singh: “This is definitely the next logical step for me, and I think this is the next logical step for what the market needs.” Singh follows in the path of several other firms to explicitly target startups that have raised seed funding but not yet obtained Series A funding, including Venture51, Capital Partners (the new fund of Ronny Conway), and Bullpen Capital, which StrictlyVC profiled last week.

IDG Ventures USA, the early-stage, San Francisco-based venture firm, looks to be sewing up its third fund, judging by an SEC filing first flagged by VentureBeat. The filing states that the firm has raised $65.2 million and is targeting $100 million. IDG is focused on media, enterprise IT, and consumer Internet companies and is managed by Alex Rosen, Pat Kenealy, and Phil Sanderson. The group, which was established in San Francisco in 2006, raised its last fund in 2009. You can check out its portfolio here.

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Exits

Dachis Group, a six-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based social and brand analytics company, has been acquired by another social media analytics company, 4.5-year-old, New York-based Sprinklr. Dachis had raised $37.5 million from Austin Ventures. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Simple, a 4.5-year-old, Portland, Or.-based banking startup, has been acquired for $117 million in cash by the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, a 150-year old, Spanish banking operation. Simple had raised roughly $15.3 million from investors, including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, 500 Startups, Shasta Ventures, and IA Ventures.

Spider.io, a three-year-old, London-based startup that tries to detect online ad fraud, has been acquired by Google for undisclosed terms. Cnet has more on the deal here.

Tedemis, an eight-year-old, Paris-based software company focused on personalized email marketing, has been acquired by the publicly traded digital performance advertising company Criteo for $23 million in cash, with another $5.4 million being deferred based on agreed milestones. Tedemis describes itself as venture-backed though hasn’t disclosed how much it has raised or from which investors.

Xora, a 15-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based market specialist in mobile workforce management, is being merged into the mobile workforce management and optimization software company ClickSoftware Technologies for $14.7 million in cash, plus working capital and cash adjustments. Xora has raised roughly $20 million over the years, including from Rho Capital Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, BlueStream Ventures, and Split Rock Partners.

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People

ML co-inventor Tim Bray is leaving Google after a four-year run, saying he didn’t want to move to California from his beloved Vancouver. In a self-styled Q&A, Bray asks if everyone won’t be working remotely in the future, to which he answers: “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to build a company around the notion of a distributed workforce, but I don’t know how far you can scale it. Anyhow, that’s not the kind of company Google has chosen to build. How reasonable is it to argue, given the results they’ve been getting?”

Om Malik, the popular founder of the media property GigaOm, announced yesterday that he’s relinquishing his day-to-day involvement with the business and becoming a partner at True Ventures, the early-stage venture firm where he has been a venture partner for several years. “I’m looking forward to a long-needed break after more than 25 years at the daily grind of writing the first draft of history,” Malik wrote in a post yesterday. More here.

Jon Mills, the founder and former CEO of a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based analytics startup called Motionloft, has been arrested by the FBI following allegations that he misled investors about an acquisition of the company while spending lavishly on private jets, expensive dinners, and parties with celebrities. TechCrunch has the story.

Andrew Reed, formerly a San Francisco-based tech banker with Goldman Sachs, has joined Sequoia Capital‘s growth equity practice, along withMatt Huang, who co-founded a social media analytics company called Hotspots.io that was acquired by Twitter. Dan Primack of Fortune has the story.

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Happenings

Oasis, the newest iteration of the Montgomery Technology Conference, takes place March 4th and 5th in Santa Monica, Ca., and the line-up looks interesting. Speakers include John Chen, the newest CEO of Blackberry (he’s widely credited with turning around an ailing Sybase, where he was CEO previously); Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMWare spin-off Pivotal; andFacebook‘s director of growth and monetization, Rob Goldman. You can request an invitation here.

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Data

CB Insights looks at which stages and geographies are seeing the most mobile messaging deals.

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Job Listings

HarbourVest Partners, the giant private equity investment firm, is looking for an associate to join its secondary investment group. The job is in London. More information here.

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Essential Reads

How Google “blew its chance” to acquire WhatsApp for even more than the $19 billion that Facebook paid for it.

Tesla‘s superstar CEO Elon Musk has confirmed “conversations” with Apple, but he says any acquisition is “very unlikely” at the moment.

Invasion of the taxi snatchers: Businessweek’s Brad Stone on industry disrupting Uber.

Wall Street has ceased to be the career destination of a certain kind of status seeker. Guess where that person wants to work now.

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Detours

The dark power of fraternities.

“In two hours on President’s Day, [Girl Scout] Danielle [Lei] sold 117 boxes outside the [medical marijuana] clinic — people gobbled up all her Dulce de Leches and blazed through the Tagalongs.”

What is success? “Was Michael Jordan a successful basketball player or a very bad basketball player? No one has ever been able to answer this question.”

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Retail Therapy

This strikes us as a pretty bad idea. (Maybe it’s a generational thing?)

Long-suffering Cleveland sports fans, this one is for you.

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Happy Thursday, dear readers. Quick reminder that you can always reach me at connie@strictlyvc.com or on Twitter.

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Top News in the A.M.

Forbes has published Jan Koum‘s rag-to-riches tale, which ended with him signing the WhatsApp deal on the door of his former welfare office.

Meanwhile, it turns out Google had offered to buy WhatsApp for $10 billion.

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The Lesson of Jim Goetz: Great VCs Make Their Own Luck

People may be surprised that low-profile Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital just landed the largest-ever acquisition of a venture-backed company. They shouldn’t be.

Researchers have shown that superstar investors are remarkably consistent over time. In fact, when it comes to predicting which startups will be successful, individual VCs are roughly five times more powerful as leading indicators than the firms for which they work, according to a studypublished last May by Harvard and Carnegie Mellon academics. (The study controlled for all kinds of deviations, including industry, investment amount, the amount of experience of the VC at the time of the investment, and the age of the startup itself.)

As one of the study’s authors, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, told me when the study was first published, “The guys who know how to get big exits get big exits no matter where [they’re employed]. The guys who fail are pretty consistent about that, too.”

Goetz is clearly one of the guys in the first camp. An entrepreneur who later became a general partner at Accel Partners, Goetz scored numerous hits for the firm, including Perbit (sold to Juniper), Rhapsody (acquired by Brocade Communications), and Entrisphere (sold to Ericsson). Goetz was so good, in fact, that in 2004 Sequoia Capital hired him away from Accel.

Lucky Sequoia. Facebook’s $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp could mean as much as $3.4 billion for Sequoia’s LPs, given that Sequoia invested a reported $60 million in the company across three separate rounds for an ownership stake of as much as 19 percent. And it’s just one of the big exits that Goetz has provided Sequoia. He led the firm’s investment in AdMob, which raised less than $50 million and was acquired by Google for $750 million just three months later; and he was also the force behind Jive Networks, Nimble Storage, and Palo Alto Networks, all of which have enjoyed successful public offerings.

Another Accel partner, Peter Fenton, has followed a remarkably similar trajectory as Goetz. At Accel, Fenton quietly amassed a portfolio of 10 startups, later helping to sell two of them — JBoss to Red Hat and Wily Technologies to Computer Associates — in hugely successful outcomes for Accel.

In mid-2006, Fenton was also headhunted by another VC firm – in this case, Benchmark Capital. At Benchmark, Fenton has continued to knock the ball out of the park. Two of his more prominent investments include Yelp (which went public in 2012); and New Relic, which was valued at $750 million in a funding round a year ago. In addition, Hortonworks and Zendesk are expected to go public in the near future. And did we mention Twitter? Fenton sits on its board, too, and will reportedly net hundreds of millions of dollars personally alongside Benchmark, which owned 6.7 percent of the company at the time of Twitter’s November IPO.

Goetz and Fenton aren’t lucky; they’re consistent. And their success may encourage more firms to poach star players, particularly if their LPs have anything to say about it. Brian O’Malley, a rising star at Battery Ventures, was recently lured over to Accel. With Goetz’s big deal, other firms are surely poring over other firms’ rosters in search of their own superstars.

New Fundings

Apprity, a year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based stealth cloud security company, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners and Wing Ventures.

BeyondCore, a six-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based maker of automated analytics software, has raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures.

Ionic Security, a 2.5-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based data security company, has raised $25.5 million in Series B funding led by Google Ventures and Jafco Ventures. Other participants in the round include the Webb Investment Network and earlier investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ff Venture Capital, Tech Operators and individual investors. The funding brings Ionic’s total capital raised to $38 million.

Kapitall, a six-year-old, New York-based an online investment platform that enables investors to research and analyze stocks, mutual funds and exchange traded funds, has raised $13 million in Series B funding, reports VentureWire. Linden Venture Fund led the Series B investment, joined byBendigo Partners, founded by Kapitall’s CEO, Jarrett Lilien. The company has raised about $25 million to date.

Nativeflow, a three-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based mobile data protection company for enterprises, has raised $7.5 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners and OurCrowd. The company has raised $15 million to date.

Sidecar, the four-year-old, New York-based car ride-sharing company, has raised $10 million led by Union Square Ventures. The funding, closed on last summer but announced yesterday, comes as Sidecar tries a new approach to fares: giving riders and drivers more say over their rides and fees based on car type, price, proximity, and the driver’s ratings. Sidecar has raised roughly $15 million to date, including from Innovation Venturesand Gabriel Investments.

Strevus, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes risk and compliance software for financial services institutions, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Blumberg Capital, with participation fromU.S. Venture Partners and previous undisclosed angel investors.

ThreatStream, a year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based whose platform claims to be the first ever crowd-sourced cyber security intelligence solution that aggregates threat indicators from around the Internet and integrates them directly to an organization’s existing security infrastructure, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. Google Ventures led the round, with participation from Paladin Capital Group and individual investors.

ViSenze, a year-old, Singapore-based company that make so-called intelligent visual tools, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by Rakuten Ventures, the corporate venture unit of Rakuten. New investors Walden International and UOB Venture Management also participated in the funding round. ViSenze, which spun off from the National University of Singapore, conducts rapid image extraction and recognition, adaptive machine learning and dynamic contextual analysis to render large scale, high performance visual search.

ZenPayroll, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that provides cloud-based payroll services to small- and medium-size businesses, has raised $20 million in Series A funding from General Catalyst Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 2012, ZenPayroll raised $6.1 million in seed funding from a long line of individuals, including Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston and Box co-founder Aaron Levie.

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New Funds

We told you in January that Boulder Ventures, an 18-year-old, Boulder, Colo.-based venture firm that backs early-stage tech and life sciences companies in Colorado and the Mid-Atlantic region, is in the process of raising its sixth fund, listed on an SEC filing as $100 million. They must be closing it up, because yesterday, the firm announced that it distributed more than $100 million in cash to investors last year. (The firm has raised roughly $350 million in its history.)

The hits came from Boulder Ventures Funds IV and V, and from portfolio companies BroadHop, Clarabridge, Linerate and Rally Software, specifically. BroadHop sold to Cisco for $75 million, giving Boulder Ventures a 4.3x return; Clarabridge was recapitalized by Summit Partners and General Catalyst Partners, providing Boulder with a 3.4x return; Linerate was told to F5, giving Boulder a 9.2x return; and Rally Software went public last April. Between the IPO and a secondary stock sale last July, Boulder saw an 8.5x return on its investment as of January’s end.

In separate news, yesterday in Sunnyvale, Ca, SK Telecom Americas, which represents the interests of Korea’s SK Telecom Co., launched its SKTA Innovation Accelerator to fund data center technologies. SKTA Innovation Accelerator will pair entrepreneurs with “strategic partners” and provide them with up to $1 million in combined funding, services and facilities. Learn more here.

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IPOs

A10 Networks, a 10-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based maker of application delivery controllers, has registered with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. The company’s principal shareholders include Summit Partners, which owns 19 percent of the company, and Mitsui & Co., which owns 12.8 percent. A10’s announcement follows that of Aerohive Networks, a wireless access point manufacturer that filed for a $75 million IPO last week.

The “Candy Crush” IPO is destined to be a heartbreaker, say numerous industry observers.

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Exits

Sessions, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based personal coaching app, has been acquired by the health and fitness platform MyFitnessPal for undisclosed financial terms. Sessions had raised seed funding from Rock Health, Collaborative Fund, SV Angel and Australia’s Blackbird Ventures. MyFitnessPal, an 8.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company, has raised roughly $18 million over the years, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Accel Partners.

Skyhook Wireless, an 11-year-old, Boston-based company that helps device makers and app developers determine location information based on a combination of Wi-Fi, GPS, cell towers and other signals, has been acquired by the cellular location company TruePosition for terms that aren’t being disclosed. Re/code has more about Skyhook, which has been involved in numerous lawsuits against Google over unfair competition and patent infringement.

WhatsApp, the 4.5-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based cross-platform messaging company, has been acquired by Facebook for approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years after the deal closes. Sequoia Capital is the sole venture investor in WhatsApp and reportedly owns 19 percent of the company.

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People

Uber VC John Doerr is nearly out of Google shares, but he’s been making a mint, selling them off. According to a new SEC filing, Doerr sold 11,774 shares of the stock on Tuesday, at an average price of $1,203.33, for a total value of $14.2 million. Doerr reportedly has just 340 shares in the company remaining, valued at roughly $400,000.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have become such prominent advocates of Bitcoin that they’re taking their rebranding exercise to a whole new level with “Winkdex,” an index for Bitcoin price information. Forbes has more here.

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Happenings

General Assembly, a venture-backed educational company that offers startup classes on things like digital marketing, business fundamentals and tactics, and back-end web development, is offering up to 10 people a chance to explore the L.A. startup community — including meetings at NastyGal, FullScreen, YouTube Space, and The Honest Company. If you’re interested, register by Monday.

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Data

Private company valuations continue to soar, confirms a new survey out of the law firm Fenwick & West. According to its findings, 71 percent of the deals it saw in the fourth quarter were up rounds and just 16 percent were down rounds. Meanwhile, the average private company share price rose 57 percent, and the median share price increased 27 percent. Mark Boslet of peHUB has the details here.

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Job Listings

Computer security giant Symantec is looking for a director of corporate development in Mountain View, Ca. More here.

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Essential Reads

Apple is patenting the ability to command your phone with a nod.

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Detours

Big paydays on Wall Street often come under laser-like scrutiny, while Silicon Valley gets a pass on its own compensation excesses. Why the double standard?

Good news, fans of of “Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker”: Second City has just unearthed one of the first times it was performed by the sketch’s co-writers, Bob Odenkirk and Chris Farley.

Chris Chase of USA Today on the Russian hockey team’s performance yesterday: “Remember that Olympic ring that didn’t open at the Opening Ceremony? The hockey team losing in the quarters is like if four rings didn’t light up, then the one that did crashed to the ground, exploded and resulted in those cuddly mascots catching on fire. Russia’s collapse is the most disappointing Olympic result for a host nation in decades (if not ever).”

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Retail Therapy

An electronic cigarette that’s also a Bluetooth headset for your phone (replete with completely amazing graphic). Who says innovation is dead?

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Is it really Wednesday already?

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Top News in the A.M.

Amazon and Apple struggle with ad growth because they’re “slow, cocky and downright stingy,” reveal media buyers.

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Waiting on Seed Funds to Sprout Cash

Over the weekend, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted, as part of a broader conversation, that there are “definitely too many new small angel funds. That seems clear.”

The comment kicked off a spirited debate on Twitter about small funds and their perceived merit. But if anyone knows what’s happening in the broader world of seed funds, it’s Michael Kim of Cendana Capital, a four-year-old investment firm that has made its name by backing micro funds, including Freestyle Capital, Founder Collective, IA Ventures, K9 Ventures, PivotNorth Capital, Lerer Ventures, SoftTech VC, and Forerunner Ventures. Kim, whose firm is managing around $90 million and is raising a fresh $55 million, talked with StrictlyVC yesterday about what he’s seeing.

You’ve backed lots of micro VC firms. What’s your criteria?

We look for groups that lead or co-lead their deals. There are plenty that just chip a bit into a seed round. But for us, it’s really important that the funds we invest in focus on ownership and on being the largest investors [in a startup’s seed round], as well as having substantial reserves. We’re looking for a firm that does three to five deals a year, putting in a million dollars [into each deal] and owning 15 to 20 percent.

Most of your funds are in the Bay Area. Is that by design?

We do think about the ecosystem: it has to feature high-quality entrepreneurs, high-quality co-investors, and lots of opportunity for follow-on capital. So L.A., for example, doesn’t have a good seed ecosystem; it’s too reliant on the Sand Hill Road crowd to fund its companies.

More funds has meant more specialization. Is that a good thing or do some micro VC fund managers run the risk of backing themselves into a corner?

I think it’s very important to stake out what your value-add is. Forerunner Ventures specializes in digital commerce, so pretty much anyone who starts in that space wants to meet with [founder Kirsten Green]. IA Ventures is known for being a big data investor; Founder Collective is known for being [comprised of] ex-entrepreneurs who want to help other entrepreneurs. Assuming it will become a much more competitive world, any seed fund really needs to think about its market positioning.

How many micro VC funds are you aware of?

A lot. When I started Cendana, the clear pioneers were Steve Anderson [of Baseline Ventures], Michael Dearing of [Harrison Metal] and Mike Maples [of Floodgate]; but I’ve probably met with or interviewed more than 260 groups since then, mostly in the U.S., because we don’t invest outside of the U.S., but also from Russia, Turkey, Berlin, China.

It seems like many more micro VC funds are being founded by venture capitalists.

A subset of them are definitely younger VCs from more established firms, which is an indictment of a lot of big firms that haven’t done enough about succession issues.

Tim Connors [of PivotNorth] was at Sequoia and [U.S Venture Partners]; Chris Rust was at USVP and is starting a fund; Mamoon Hamid [also formerly of USVP] quit to join [former Mayfield Fund and Facebook exec] Chamath Palihapitiya at The Social+Capital Partnership; Aileen Lee left Kleiner Perkins to start Cowboy Ventures; Matt Holleran left Emergence Capital to start a fund [called Cloud Apps Management, which focuses on cloud business applications management]; Ullas Naik left Globespan Capital Partners to start [Streamlined Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm focused on infrastructures software]; Kent Goldman has left First Round Capital to start his own thing.

Do you think VCs who launch seed funds have an advantage over ex-operators who launch seed funds?

We think entrepreneurs have the most credibility with other entrepreneurs, because they’ve built their own companies.

The one element I’m wary about is a lot of ex-entrepreneurs’ [experience]. A lot of them haven’t seen investing cycles, and one of the quickest ways to destroy a portfolio is through follow-on rounds – investing so that you suddenly have a $2 million hole instead of a $500,000 hole [from an initial investment]. So they have to have discipline about follow-ons, bridge financings and the like.

How are all of these funds doing? Is it still too early to know?

They look promising. A lot of the established players I mentioned [like Baseline Ventures and Floodgate] and older groups like First Round have promising portfolios. But in terms of returns – aside from [Baseline], which had a huge hit in Instagram – I suspect a lot of it is [high but unrealized IRRs]. Things have been marked up hugely on paper, especially if you’re in Uber or Pinterest. But LPs are very focused on cash returns, and while last year was a great year for venture firms like Greylock, Accel, and Benchmark, which returned substantial capital back to LPs, there aren’t a lot of seed funds that could say [the same].

In the meantime, can things possibly remain as collegial as they have in past years between seed investors?

A lot of new seed funds are relatively smart about focusing on ownership. At the same time, you can’t have four funds trying to get 10 percent [of a startup]. I do think we’ll see some sharper elbows.

New Fundings

Duolingo, a 2.5-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based online language learning plaform, has raised $20 million in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Others of its investors include Union Square Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and individuals Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised roughly $38 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Extreme Reach, a six-year-old, Needham, Ma.-based video platform for integrated TV, online and mobile advertising, has raised $49 million, according to a new filing. The company’s investors include Village Ventures, Long River Ventures, Greycroft Partners, and Spectrum Equity. It has raised roughly $111 million so far, according to Crunchbase.

GuestDriven, a 4.5-year-old, Montreal-based SaaS platform that hospitality brands use to build guest engagement, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by PlazaCorp, Real Ventures and Structure Capital.

Lithera, a 6.5-year-old, San Diego-based aesthetic biotech whose lead, injectable drug is intended to reduce belly fat, has raised an additional $8 million to close its Series C round of financing that began more than a year ago with $35.6 million, reports Xconomy. Existing investors Alta Partnersand Domain Associates participated in the round, as well as new investorAKS Capital and additional undisclosed investors.

LoginRadius, a year-old, Edmonton, Canada-based “social login” company, has raised $1.3 million in financing from Accelerate Fund,Yaletown Venture Partners, Real Ventures, BDC Capital and several individual investors. The company manages a unified social API platform that combines 30 social networks, enabling sites and mobile apps to more easily implement social login, capture user social data, enable social sharing, and add single sign-on.

LumaStream, a 4.5-year-old, St. Petersburg, Fla.-based LED lighting company, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from an unnamed investment group in Ontario, Canada. LumaStream uses speaker wire to carry low-voltage power to LED fixtures; the same wire controls and dims the LEDs, eliminating the need for secondary control wiring, according to the company.

MD Revolution, a three-year-old, San Diego-based company whose online platform helps patients manage their health by integrating different technologies that track their cardiovascular health, nutrition, exercise, and other healthy practices, has raised $7 million in Series B funding from unnamed individual investors. The financing brings the company’s total funding to date to $8 million.

Postmates, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based mobile delivery service that aims to drop off goods like groceries in less than an hour, has raised $16 million in Series B funding led by Spark Capital. The company has now raised $22 million altogether, including from Crosslink Capital,SoftTech VC, Founders Fund, and Matrix Partners.

Renaissance Learning, a 28-year-old, Wisconsin Rapids, Wi.-based K-12 assessment and learning analytics companies, has raised $40 million from Google Capital, the search giant’s late-stage investment vehicle. TechCrunch has more on the deal, which marks Google Capital’s first foray into education, here.

Socialbakers, a 5.5-year-old, Prague-based, social media analytics and optimization company, has raised $26 million in Series C funding led byIndex Ventures, with existing investor Earlybird participating. To date, the company has raised $34 million, shows Crunchbase.

StoryVine, a two-year-old, Boulder-based startup that’s trying to disrupt the professional video production market by automating the process of creating a brand videos, has raised an undisclosed amount of capital fromPavonis Capital in New York. The deal marks the first tech investment for Pavonis, which typically invests in real estate technology companies and property.

To8to, a 4.5-year-old, Henan, China-based online interior decoration platform, has raised $16.5 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital and followed by Series A investor Matrix Partners. To8to is a third-party platform for customers, decoration companies, designers and construction material providers.

Tictail, a nearly three-year-old, Stockholm-based, do-it-yourself e-commerce platform that invites users to quickly and easily set up virtual storefronts, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital. Other investors in the round included Balderton Capital, Project A Ventures, Creandum, and individual investors. The company has raised roughly $9.6 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

UrbanSitter, 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based online and mobile service for parents and sitters to connect through people they know, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by DBL Investors with participation from the IAC division Match Group and Aspect Ventures, the new venture firm of Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad. Earlier investors Canaan Partners, First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to roughly $22 million.

Versartis, a 5.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based biotech company focused on developing a treatment for growth hormone deficiency, has raised $55 million in Series E funding from five undisclosed new investors. Previous investors, including Sofinnova Ventures, Aisling Capital, New Leaf Venture Partners and Advent Life Sciences, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $132 million.

Weedingtech, a three-year-old, London-based maker of an herbicide-free weedkiller, has raised $1.25 million in a deal backed by private investors including Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, through his venture firm Millhouse. Other investors in the round included venture capitalist Jon Moulton and Ben Goldsmith, founder of green investment firm WHEB Group.

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New Funds

ClearVue Partners, a two-year-old, Shanghai, China-based early-stage venture firm, announced today that it has raised $262 million for its first fund, ClearVue Partners, L.P., well exceeded its target of $200 million. ClearVue Partners focuses on investment opportunities in the fast growing consumer market in Greater China, specifically in the food & beverage, consumer products, and consumer internet & mobile sectors.

Mayfield Fund has finished raising its second Indian fund, and is closing it with $108 million, says VentureBeat. The Sand Hill Road firm began marketing the fund one year ago. It closed its first India-focused fund, a $111 million pool called Mayfield India I, in 2008.

Sequoia Capital, the 43-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based venture firm, has registered official paperwork for two new venture funds focused on growth investments in China and the United States; meanwhile, Sequoia Capital India, which is independent of U.S.-based Sequoia, is raising its fourth fund. Fortune has reported that Sequoia expects to raise up to $1 billion for the U.S. growth fund, up to $600 million for the China growth fund and up to $600 million for the India fund.

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IPOs

Versartis, a 5.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based biotech that’s developing treatments for growth hormone deficiency, has filed to raise up to $80 million in an IPO on the heels of a big fundraise. (See above.) Its principal shareholders include New Leaf Ventures, which owns 24.4 percent of the company; Index Ventures, which owns 22.4 percent;Advent Life Sciences, which owns 16.3 percent; Aisling Capital, which owns 11.9 percent; and Sofinnova Venture Partners, which owns 6.8 percent.

Wave goodbye to the biotech wave, says Renaissance Capital; tech is about to take over.

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People

Legendary Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway is selling his San Francisco home, a 5,360-square-foot flat that takes up the entire floor of a historic co-op building. The home, listed for $9.5 million (down $500,000 from its original asking price) is truly stunning; StrictlyVC headed over once for a story and would have been perfectly happy to live out her life in its expansive living room. Take a tour here.

Peter Magnusson, a former engineering director at Google, has joinedSnapchat as a vice president of engineering, co-founder Bobby Murphytold the WSJ yesterday. Snapchat could add as many as 50 engineers this year to its current team of just 15 developers, Murphy said.

Mindy Mount, who joined the smart devices company Jawbone last May, is out, reports Re/code. Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman announced the news in an all-hands meeting yesterday morning. Mount came to Jawbone from Microsoft, where she was most recently a corporate VP and CFO at its Online Services Division, and was seen as part of Jawbones attempt to upgrade its management before an IPO. But sources tell Re/code it wasn’t a good fit for the company or for Mount, who leaves as Jawbone is reportedly raising a $250 million round that values it at $3.3 billion. Much more here.

John Pleasants, the former co-president of Disney Interactive and former COO of Electronic Arts, has joined the new seed-stage investment fund SparkLabs Global Ventures as an advisor. Pleasants left Disney in areorganization last November.

Chelsea Stoner has been promoted to general partner at Battery Ventures, which she joined in 2006 from the private equity firm Key Principal Partners. Stoner, who specializes in software and healthcare technology, was trained as a chemical engineer at Northwestern University, but told the WSJ in 2012 that it was “too lab-intensive. I was not out talking to folks. It did not fit with my personality, although I loved the math and science behind it.” Stoner is the first female general partner in Battery’s 31-year history.

Graham Younger, who runs SAP’s SuccessFactors unit, is joining the cloud storage and collaboration company Box as executive VP for worldwide field operations. Box CEO Aaron Levie tells Re/code that Younger will take charge of Box’s sales force as the company looks to convert its many international free users into paid users.

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Happenings

Coming up on March 4, you might be interested in a panel discussion at SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca., centering on whether Apple‘s best days are ahead. Panelists include Leander Kahney, the publisher of CultofMac.com; Yukari Iwatani Kane, author of Haunted Empire: Apple after Steve Jobs; and Fred Vogelstein, contributing editor at Wired and author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. The program starts at 7 p.m.

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Data

Curious to know the average number of days companies spend confidentially discussing their IPO plans with the SEC? The magic number is 74 days, says the WSJ, which analyzed the confidential filings of 209 US. companies that have submitted documents to the SEC since October 15, 2012. More on its findings here.

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Job Listings

Omidyar Network is looking for an “experienced and entrepreneurial professional” to serve as its first Director of Impact. The job is in Redwood City, Ca. Apply here.

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Essential Reads

Doh. Security researchers recommend people stop using Belkin’s WeMo home automation products after uncovering a variety of vulnerabilities thatattackers can exploit to take control of home networks, thermostats, or other connected devices.

CFOs say they are facing a surge of inquiries from companies seeking to be acquired. Behind the influx is the shrinking pool of financing available to late-stage startups and the huge piles of cash held by many larger companies that are looking to buy growth.

Don’t be a Glasshole and ruin it for the other Explorers, capisce?

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Detours

Life in the nineties, by the always sharp Roger Angell. (This may be the most beautiful essay on aging we’ve ever read.)

If you didn’t already do this upon graduating, it’s time to say goodbye to Hot Pockets, forever.

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Retail Therapy

A collapsible lawn mower that folds up and out of the way. We are in love.

Jewelry that looks and smells like food. We can’t think of a better idea, other than maybe this chicken sandwich USB hub. We’ll take one egg pendant, please, hold the bacon!

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Hi, everyone, welcome back and happy Tuesday!

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Another day, another leaked document from Edward Snowden. This time, everyone is buzzing over the news that British spies targeted WikiLeaks readers.

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Innovation in Snapchat Time

There’s been a lot of talk of “ephemerality” in tech circles lately, driven in part by the rise of Snapchat, the popular mobile app that allows users to send self-destructing messages and images. But Niko Bonatsos, a principal at General Catalyst Partners — which participated in Snapchat’s A and B funding rounds — thinks the trend is becoming ubiquitous and that Internet startups have less time than ever to prove themselves before their window of opportunity slams shut.

Yesterday, I chatted with Bonatsos about the “rapid decay” of so-called digital assets, with Bonatsos noting that our loyalty to digital products at an all-time low. To make his point, Bonatsos ticked off a list of “digital” companies to fall from their perches, many disrupted in the span of five years or less (think MySpace, Blackberry, AOL, and Firefox, among others).

Bonatsos also pointed to mobile phone apps, noting that more than half the top 100 Android and iOS apps today didn’t exist just a year ago, and that the lists are almost entirely different than two and three years ago.

“Unlike 10 years ago, when we still had product life cycles, today, [users migrate to a new technology] as more of an impulse, and there isn’t a lot of time to act if your product isn’t perfect. People will just migrate to the next form factor, the next paradigm.”

I asked Bonatsos how this constant migration of users is impacting the way he invests. After all, what’s to say people won’t move on from Snapchat to some other app that gains their confidence? He said Snapchat serves a core human need right now – to be authentic and express ourselves privately — which is one of his firm’s criteria. Bonatsos said another buffer against fickle consumers is to back companies that are “used every day to solve a real world problem.” Here, he pointed to Uber, which has largely replaced the frustrating process of calling a cab, and the travel metasearch engine Kayak, a General Catalyst portfolio company that was acquired by Priceline last May.

Still, he noted that it’s never been so important for digital startups to “be on top of their numbers” to “deeply understand the intensity of [their users’] engagement,” and to “be smart [and] leverage user acquisition channels really early on, when they are cheap.”

Bonatsos – who was raised in Athens and holds engineering degrees from Stanford, the University of Cambridge, and the National Technical University of Athens — acknowledged that all of it is “easier said than done.” He also said that startups typically have “some time” to take action if their metrics aren’t heading in an ideal direction — but not much.

“Even when something becomes mainstream,” he said, “the clock is ticking.”

New Fundings

17u.cn, a 10-year-old, Suzhou, China-based online travel services platform, has raised $82.5 million in Series C funding from Tencent Holdings, Boyu Capital and Oriza Holdings, according to Chinese media reports. Previously, 17u.cn received $5.8 million in Series A funding from Oriza Holdings in 2008, and an undisclosed amount of Series B funding from Tencent in 2012.

Cheyipai, a 4.5-year-old, Beijing-based, used-car trading platform, has received $50 million in Series C funding, according to the company.Sequoia Capital led the round. CITIC Capital and earlier investorsMorningside Ventures and Matrix Partners also participated. Cheyipai has raised $75 million to date.

Clue, a year-old, Berlin-based digital fertility startup, has raised $836,000 in seed funding led by individuals, including Christophe Maire, Joanne Wilson, and earlier investor Thomas Madsen-
Mygdal.

Elastica, a 1.5-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company that sells cloud application security services, has raised $6.3 million in a Series A funding led by Mayfield Fund.

EnModus, a 3.5-year-old, Wales-based smart home automation startup, has raised $2.5 million in seed investment from current investorAndromeda Capital Partners and new investor Finance Wales. The company’s core technology is Wattwave, a power line communications protocol for appliances and buildings.

Hampton Creek Foods, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s creating alternatives to animal-based foods (including an organic product that tastes like chicken eggs), has raised $23.3 million in Series B funding, led by Horizons Ventures. Other investors to participate in the round included Khosla Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and serial entrepreneur Ali Partovi. Hampton Creek has raised roughly $30 million to date.

Hyperfair, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco, CA-based virtual trade show platform, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Atlante Ventures and Como Venture.

Intacct, a 15-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company that makes cloud-based financial management software, has raised $45 million led byBattery Ventures, which was joined by Silicon Valley Bank and Morgan Creek Capital Management. Previous investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Costanoa Venture Capital, Emergence Capital,Sigma Partners and Split Rock Partners, also participated.

Little Bird, an 18-month-old, Portland, Or.-based company whose technology makes it easier for brands to find and interact with online “influencers”, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding led by the Oregon Angel Fund. The company, led by former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, has raised $2.7 million altogether.

Novimmune, a 16-year-old, Geneva, Switzerland-based biotech company focused treating immune-related disorders, has raised $66 million in Series B funding led by Rosetta Capital, which was joined by one new, undisclosed investor and earlier investors. The company has raised $211 million over the years, according to Crunchbase.

Palantir Technologies, the 10-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based data insights company with roots in the intelligence world, has raised a lot of money, shows a couple of new SEC filings that were processed on Friday. The first filing shows a close on $111 million from a fundraising effort that began in June of last year. The second filing shows a separate fundraising effort that began in late November; it says the total offering sold since is $279 million.

Safello, a year-old, Stockholm-based online processing exchange, has received $600,000 in seed money from individual investors. VentureBeat has much more here. The company has raised roughly $1 million to date.

Transcriptic, a two-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based maker of remote robotic labs, has raised $2.8 million from investors. The company has raised $4 million to date, including from Google Ventures and Founders Fund. VentureWire has more here.

TutorGroup, a nine-year-old, Shanghai-based online language-learning platform, has raised nearly $100 million, including from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fundTemasek, and Qiming Venture Partners, which earlier invested $15 million in the company.

Uniquedu, a Beijing-based education-based company has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Fosun Group’s venture capital arm Fosun Venture Capital Investment.

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New Funds

Capital Partners, a new, Palo Alto-based investment fund founded byRonny Conway, son of renowned angel investor Ron Conway, is raising a $51 million fund, according to an SEC filing. (Though the filing, dated February 13, says the first sale has yet to occur, a TechCrunch source says the fund is already closed.) Conway additionally filed for two separate funds on Friday, one called Capital Parallel Fund A, which lists $5 million as its target, and Capital Parallel Fund B, which lists $14 million as a target. Fortune reported last fall that Conway was raising a fund to back seed-funded companies before they seek out Series A funding.

Commerce Ventures, an 18-month-old, San Francisco-based micro-VC fund focusing on the “future of commerce,” has raised $13.3 million, according to a new SEC filing. Commerce Ventures was founded in the fall of 2012 by Dan Rosen, a former principal with Highland Capital Partnerswho focused on mobile and payments startups for the firm. Before joining Highland, Rosen was an associate at HarbourVest Partners, worked in corporate development at RSA Security; and served as a software consultant for American Management Systems.

Greenspring Associates, a 13-year-old, Owings Mills, Md.-based venture capital fund of funds, is nearing a close of its latest venture capital and growth equity fund of funds, even as the firm prepares two new offerings,an investor tells the WSJ. The firm has raised $182.8 million so far forGreenspring Global Partners VI LP, show SEC filings.

Inimiti Capital Partners, a two-year-old, Herzelia, Israel-based venture fund that describes its focus as “software platforms and services in the new media space,” has raised $30 million of a planned $35 million fund, according to a new SEC filing that shows the firm has been raising the capital since June 2012. Founders include Ofer Timor, who co-founded and managed Delta Ventures, a seed and early stage Israeli fund; Nimrod Lev, a serial entrepreneur whose startup kSolo was later acquired by MySpace (Lev then served as a senior VP and general manager for MySpace); and Alon Geva, who previously founded Nuvisio, a software company in the direct marketing space.

Siemens Venture Capital is launching a new, $100 million fund to back early-stage startups working in the areas of industrial automation and other digital technologies that can transform manufacturing. Learn more here.

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IPOs

Akebia Therapeutics, a 6.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotech that’s developing treatments for anemia, has filed to raise up to $75 million in an IPO. The company’s principal shareholders include Novartis Bioventures, which owns 25.1 percent of Akebia; Venture Investors Early Stage Fund IV, which owns 11.3 percent; trusts and other affiliates of Muneer Satter, which own 11.1 percent; Kearny Venture Partners, which owns 10.4 percent; Novo, which owns 10.2 percent, and Triathlon Medical Ventures, which owns 8.7 percent.

Borderfree, a 15-year-old, New York-based service that helps retailers handle transactions with online customers in foreign countries, has confidentially filed to go public, reports the WSJ. Borderfree raised roughly $10 million from investors in 2012, including Delta Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, Adam Street Partners, and financing from Viola Credit.

Japan Display, the world’s biggest maker of displays for smartphones, incuding the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5C, is planning to raise up to $4 billion in what would be Asia’s biggest IPO so far this year, reports the WSJ. The company was formed from the liquid crystal display units of Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony Corp., with a Japanese government-backed fund pouring $2 billion into the combined entity.

King Digital Entertainment, the Irish publisher behind “Candy Crush” and several other big mobile games, has filed its initial IPO papers with the SEC. Re/code has more here.

Spotify is eyeing an IPO, says Reuters, which reported yesterday that the online music streaming service has hired a a U.S. financial reporting specialist. According to the report, one banker said Spotify could be valued at as much as $8 billion. (Publicly traded Pandora is valued at $7 billion currently.) Spotify has raised roughly $540 million since its 2006 founding, including from Horizons Ventures, Wellington Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures.

Why India’s answer to Alibaba and eBay is the tech IPO to watch.

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Exits

CoStim Pharmaceuticals, a two-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotechnology firm, is being acquired by Switzerland-based Novartis for an undisclosed sum. CoStim was backed by Atlas Venture, MPM Capital, and Partners Innovation Fund. The Boston Globe has much more about the acquisition here.

SlickLogan, a year-old Israeli security startup, has been acquired byGoogle for an undisclosed sum. Under the terms of the deal (financial details of which aren’t being disclosed), Google will be absorbing the workforce of the sound-based password developer.

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People

Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston on the incubator’s earliest days nine years ago: “Paul Buchheit, who’s one of the YC partners who invented Gmail, gives this great advice which is, ‘It’s so much better to make a few people love you, than a lot of people just like you.’ And that is just so true, with whatever you’re doing. And that’s what it was for us. A few people loved us, and we just sort of just grew from there. So even though reporters didn’t love us, they wouldn’t return my phone calls and could care less that we were doing this new way of funding, we just moved on. We didn’t need them.”

Google is moving into San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. At least, it looks to be moving up to 200 of its employees — mostly engineers who don’t want to trek down to its Mountain View headquarters — to the Mission, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Eighteen “power couples” in tech, care of Business Insider.

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Happenings

The Columbia Business School is hosting its 20th annual Private Equity & Venture Capital conference in New York on February 28. Greycroft Partners founder Alan Patricof, Canaan Partners cofounder Eric Young, and NEA managing partner Peter Barris are speaking at the event, which you can register for here.

The Launch festival is coming to the San Francisco Design Center Concourse, February 24 through February 26. More information here.

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Data

CB Insights mined its app store data to identify which apps in the ephemeral app ecosystem are doing well (or not). At the top of CB’s list, unsurprisingly, are Snapchat and Whisper; slightly more surprising is how little the rest of the players in the space have received as of yet.

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Job Listings

Aarki, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based mobile ad platform company, is in the market for a COO with a media background.

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Essential Reads

A study released Friday by UC-Hastings Professor Robin Feldman and Harvard Fellow Dr. Nicholson Price predicts that biopharmaceutical companies will become a growing target of patent trolls. In their deliberately “light, rather than an exhaustive, search,” they identify dozens of patents that could be deployed against current industries, from active ingredients of drugs to dosage forms to screening methods to identify new drugs.

Meet Deborah Liu, the woman behind Facebook‘s fast-growing mobile app install ads.

Robocoin, a Las Vegas company, says that later this month, it will install the first ATMs in the United States that let users buy and sell bitcoin, the latest step into the mainstream for the digital currency. Reuters has more.

Secret revealed: a look inside the most scandalous social network.

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Detours

Watch as a 900-foot asteroid zips by Earth.

What does it take to be so fabulous that your wardrobe overshadows the Olympics? According to Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski, a lot of preparation.

German table tennis player Timo Boll versus the Kuka KR Agilus robot. Coming soon.

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Retail Therapy

Keep track of how many drinks you’ve consumed with the Bevometer. (If you need this, you should just check yourself straight into rehab.)

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